Virgil Recomposed The Mythological and Secular Centos in Antiquity

  

Virgil Recomposed:

The Mythological and

Secular Centos in Antiquity

  

Scott McGill

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

  Virgil Recomposed

  

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  P M S Virgil Recomposed The Mythological and Secular Centos in Antiquity

  COTT C

  ILL

  S M G

  Virgil Recomposed

The Mythological and Secular

Centos in Antiquity Scott McGill

  1

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ISBN-13 978-0-19-517564-6

  

1. Virgil—Adaptations—History and criticism. 2. Virgil—Parodies, imitations, etc.—History and

criticism. 3. Epic poetry, Latin—Adaptations—History and criticism. 4. Centos—History and

criticism. 5. Mythology, Roman, in literature. 6. Virgil—Appreciation—Rome. I. Title. II. Series.

PA6825.M395 2005 871'.01—dc22 2004022887 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

  To My Son, Charlie

  This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments

  This book began when I decided to take Ausonius outside with me on a lazy summer day and read the Moselle. Opening Green’s edition at random, I instead encountered the Cento Nuptialis, and a dissertation topic was born. Desidiosum iuvat Fortuna.

  Several years have passed since then. I completed and many times revised the dissertation; finishing (or better, abandoning) it now as a monograph, I feel somewhat wistful, since the project is so closely associated with a remarkable time in my life, and with many remarkable people. I learned much as a graduate student from my professors, particularly Michael Anderson, Bob Babcock, Susanna Braund, and Gordon Williams, who were all models of mentoring, prodding me patiently and amiably to think harder and with more clarity. As an advisor sine titulo and a reader of the dissertation, Michael Roberts helped me to realize this project in more ways than I can recount. Finally, John Matthews and Ellen Oliensis were as generous, supportive, and rigorous advisors as I could have hoped to have.

  Since arriving at Rice University, I have benefited from the healthy and nur- turing environment that the university and the Classical Studies Department create for its junior faculty. In more concrete terms, I appreciate the editorial work of Cyndy Brown, which certainly sped my progress. My colleagues, Coulter George, Christopher Kelty, Michael Maas, Hilary Mackie, Don Morrison, Car- oline Quenemoen, and Harvey Yunis also facilitated the preparation of my manuscript. Conversation with them, teaching alongside them, and having them as editors have been truly enjoyable and productive experiences.

  When this book needed a final round of scrubbing, Donald Mastronarde and the anonymous readers at the APA provided me with both general and specific assis- tance. Their criticism allowed me to avoid many errors and escape many pitfalls— though fallibility is stubborn, and I am sure that mistakes and infelicities remain, for which of course I am alone responsible. I must also thank Eve Bachrach, Jessica Ryan, and Gwen Colvin at Oxford University Press for their guidance.

  XVIII Cento Nuptialis from The Works of Ausonius, by R.P.H. Green (1991), was reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press. The translation of

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  viii the Trustees of the Loeb Classical Library from Ausonius: Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library vol. 96, translated by H. G. Evelyn-White (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1919). The Loeb Classical Library 1 is a registered trademark of the President and Fellows of Harvard College. The De Alea was reprinted by permission of Loffredo Editore Napoli SpA. Finally, the Epitha- lamium Fridi and Medea were reprinted by permission of K.G. Saur Verlag.

  Throughout the entire process of writing this book, my family has been an anchor. I particularly want to thank my brother Sean and my parents, who taught me by example how to be disciplined and to stick to a task until it is done. In different ways, I am indebted to old friends in the Northeast (though the academic diaspora has taken us to far-flung locations) and new ones in Houston, and especially to Joseph Luzzi. Finally, Sarah Ellenzweig makes everything worthwhile and better than I deserve.

  At the risk of being precious, let me end by saying what a pleasure it has been these past years to read and think about not only some of the wildest texts in antiquity but also Virgil, who as a poet has no superior and just a few equals. non, mihi si linguae centum sint oraque centum (A. 6.625), caelicolae magni (A. 10.6) possim superare labores (A. 3.368) carmina qui (G. 4.565) matrisque dedit tibi, Mantua, nomen (A. 10.200).

  Contents

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

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   BOOKS AL R Anthologia Latina, Alexander Riese, ed. Leipzig: Teubner, 1894.

  AL SB Anthologia Latina, D. R. Shackleton Bailey, ed. Stuttgart: Teubner, 1982. ANRW Aufstieg und Niedergang der ro¨mischen Welt. Berlin and New York: DeGruyter, 1972–. CIL Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. Berlin: Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1863–. CSEL Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum. Vienna: F. Tempsky et al., 1866–. EV Enciclopedia Virgiliana. Ed. Francesco Della Corte. Rome: Instituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1996. Keil Heinrich Keil, Grammatici Latini, 7 vols; Heinrich Keil, ed. Leipzig: Teubner, 1855–80. OCD Oxford Classical Dictionary. 3rd ed. Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. OLD Oxford Latin Dictionary. P.G.W. Glare, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. PLRE Jones, A.H.M., J.R. Martindale, and J. Morris. Prosopography of the

  Later Roman Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971– 1992. RE Paulys Real-Encyclopa¨die der Klassischen Altertumswissenschaft. Stutt- gart: A. Druckenmu¨ller, 1893–1972. ThLL Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. Leipzig: Teubner, 1900–.

  VSD Vita Suetonii/Donati, Vitae Vergilianae Antiquae, ed. Georgius Brugnoli and Fabius Stock. Rome: Typis Officinae Polygraphicae, 1997.

  JOURNALS

  AJAH American Journal of Ancient History

  ABBREVIATIONS

  xii BMCR Bryn Mawr Classical Review CJ Classical Journal CP Classical Philology CQ Classical Quarterly CSCA California Studies in Classical Antiquity HSCP Harvard Studies in Classical Philology MD Material e Discussioni MP

  Medieval Philology PVS

  Proceedings of the Vergil Society RLM

  Rheinisches Museum fu¨r Philologie RLAC Reallexikon fu¨r Antike und Christentum SIFC Studi italiani di filologia classica TAPA Transactions of the American Philological Association YCGL Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature ZPE Zeitschrift fu¨r Papyrologie und Epigraphik

  

  VIRGIL

P. Vergili Maronis Opera, ed. R.A.B. Mynors. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969.

CENTOS

Alcesta, De Panificio, Europa, Hercules et Antaeus, Iudicium Paridis, Hippodamia, Nar-

cissus, and Progne et Philomela, in Anthologia Latina I.1, ed. Alexander Riese. Leipzig:

  Teubner, 1894.

Cento Nuptialis, in The Works of Ausonius, ed. R.P.H. Green. Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1991.

  

De Alea, in Il centone De Alea, Studi Latini 44, ed. Gabriella Carbone. Naples: Loffredo,

2002. Epithalamium Fridi, in Luxurius, ed. Heinz Happ. 2 vols. Stuttgart: Teubner, 1986.

Medea, in Hosidius Geta: Medea Cento Vergilianus, ed. Rosa Lamacchia. Leipzig: Teubner, 1981.

OTHER FREQUENTLY CITED EDITIONS

  

ANTHOLOGIA LATINA: Anthologia Latina I.1, ed. D. R. Shackleton Bailey. Stuttgart:

Teubner, 1982. CATULLUS: Catullus, ed. C. J. Fordyce. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961.

CLAUDIAN: Claudii Claudiani Carmina, ed. John Barrie Hall. Leipzig: Teubner, 1985.

DRACONTIUS: Oeuvres, ed. E´tienne Wolff. Vol. 4. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1996.

MENANDER RHETOR: Menander Rhetor, ed. D. A. Russell and N. G. Wilson. Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1981.

OVID: Heroides XII, ed. Theodor Heinze. Leiden: Brill, 1997. Metamorphoses, ed. W. S.

  Anderson. Leipzig: Teubner, 1977.

QUINTILIAN: Institutionis Oratoriae Libri Duodecim, ed. Michael Winterbottom. Ox-

ford: Clarendon Press, 1970.

  SENECA: Tragoediae, ed. Otto Zwierlein. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.

SERVIUS: Servii Grammatici Qui Feruntur in Vergilii Carmina Commentarii, ed. Georg

Thilo and Herman Hagen. 3 vols. Hildesheim: Olms, 1961.

  

SIDONIUS: Sidoine Apollinaire, ed. Andre´ Loyen. 3 vols. Paris: Socie´te´ d’E´dition ‘‘Les

Belles Lettres,’’ 1960–70. STATIUS: Silvae, ed. E. Courtney. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.

  

VENANTIUS FORTUNATUS: Venance Fortunat Poe`mes, ed. Marc Reydellet. Vol. 1.

  Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1994.

  

VITA SUETONII/DONATI: Vitae Vergilianae Antiquae, ed. Georgius Brugnoli and

Fabius Stock. Rome: Typis Officinae Polygraphicae, 1997.

TEXT EDITIONS USED

  xiv A note on my method of citing lines and passages in the centos. I have chosen to include in parentheses the Virgilian provenance (with E. standing for the Eclogues, G. for the Georgics, and A. for the Aeneid) for each verse segment in each line that I cite. This, I recognize, interrupts the flow of the line, with Virgil breaking into the experience of reading the passages in the centos. I believe that such intrusions are appropriate. The centos demand to be read not as trans- parent texts, but as works having a Virgilian basis.

  

  The Virgilian centos are some of the more striking texts to survive from Latin antiquity. A cento—a word that in literature has the meaning ‘‘patchwork

  

  text’’ —is comprised of unconnected verse units taken from the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid and pieced together to create narratives that differ from

2 Virgil’s own. These units may consist of a segment of a hexameter line; an entire

  line; a line and some section of the following line; and rarely two or three entire

   lines. Sixteen Virgilian centos remain from antiquity, ranging in date from ca.

  

  200 to ca. 534. Twelve are on mythological or secular subjects: Hosidius Geta’s

   Medea; Ausonius’s Cento Nuptialis; Luxurius’s Epithalamium Fridi; Mavortius’s

  Iudicium Paridis; and eight anonymous works, the De Panificio, De Alea, Nar- cissus, Hippodamia, Hercules et Antaeus, Progne et Philomela, Europa, and Al- cesta. The remaining four contain Christian material: the Cento Probae of Faltonia Betitia Proba; Pomponius’s Versus ad Gratiam Domini; the anonymous

   De Verbi Incarnatione; and the De Ecclesia, perhaps written by Mavortius.

  The mythological and secular centos are very different texts from the Christian variety. The settings in which and for which the former works were composed, the ways their authors rewrote Virgil, and many of the interpretive issues the texts raise all distinguish them from the Christian pieces. In light of these disparities, my book isolates the mythological and secular centos. A study of these works will contribute to the growing field of scholarship on non- Christian Latin poetry in late antiquity (i.e., texts without Christian content and

  

  usually with classical prototypes and themes). The mythological and secular centos especially help us explore the enthusiasm for light and playful verse composition that abided in that era. In addition, an examination of the centos advances the current scholarship on Virgil’s reception. Of particular value is the attention that the book gives to the late antique world. Regarding Virgil’s re- ception in that period, there has been a great amount of work done on how

   Christian writers, and particularly the Church Fathers, responded to him.

  While this subject is an important one, there remains much to be said about how audiences not viewing Virgil through a Christian lens—for example, poets working with pagan and secular material, grammarians and other late antique

  INTRODUCTION

  xvi and at the same time allow us to revisit pertinent responses to Virgil that oc- curred earlier in antiquity and to explore relevant moments in the interpretation of Virgil since that period, up to today. So too, the centos provide insights into

   several formal and thematic elements in Virgil’s poetry itself.

  Aspects of the mythological and secular centos bear upon a wide range of other subjects of general interest in Latin poetry, which are in turn important in literary studies as a whole. These include questions related to reception theory (a topic vitally connected but not limited in this book to Virgil’s Nachleben) and

  

  genre theory. An issue of vital importance in the study of the centos, more- over, is how those radically intertextual works engage with their Virgilian sources allusively and speak to ideas and problems in allusion studies. The broad hermeneutic reach and value of the centos are yet another reason why the

   works are worthy of exclusive attention.

  The origin of the Virgilian cento lies in the Homeric cento, of which mytho-

  

  logical, secular, and Christian examples survive. Such a binary view does not take into account all ancient centos. It excludes evidence for Greek examples

  

  that reuse Pindar and Anacreon, as well as a Latin cento composed from a poet other than Virgil, Ovid’s work in malos poetas comprised of the verses of

   Even so, the contention that

  the Virgilian cento arose as a counterpart to the Homeric cento is a sound one, based as it is on the irrefutable fact that Homer and Virgil are the principal

  

  sources for such texts in antiquity. This cannot be coincidental. Associating Virgil with Homer serves as one of the dominant gestures in Latin literary

   culture from Propertius (2.34.65–66) to Macrobius (Sat. 5) and beyond.

  Amid this literary landscape, it would have been natural to take a poetic form linked to Homer and apply it to Virgil, the poet of equal stature in the Roman world. Centonists are drawn to such canonical authors. To present a cento is always on one level to trade in cultural capital and to affirm one’s highbrow credentials. Moreover, the loftier the rank of the poet being rewritten, the greater the effect of a cento. Readers will be more likely to be familiar with source poetry that resides at or near the top of the canon, and so will be more likely to feel more strongly the frisson that centos, as the reconstituted poetry of an eminent author, are designed to elicit.

  Not everyone has responded or will respond to the Virgilian centos with appreciative wonder or even neutral surprise. Some ancient observers, for in- stance, raised objections to the texts. None of these disapproving notices, however, should be seen to condemn the cento form as such; for upon closer examination, they simply reflect the particular concerns of the figures that voiced them, Tertullian (De Praescr. Haer. 39), Jerome (Ep. 53.7), and Ausonius (Cento Nuptialis, praef. esp. 1–5). Tertullian and Jerome were interested in establishing the cento—for Tertullian, the mythological and secular type, and for

17 Jerome, the Christian —as a parallel to how certain people misread the Bible,

  INTRODUCTION

  xvii

  

  the source material. Jerome was also troubled by the alteration of Virgil so that his verses related the story of the Bible, which caused some to posit Virgil as a Christian sine Christo; but for Jerome the act of altering Virgil itself was not at issue. Tertullian and Jerome’s reactions are thus tailored to their specific con- cerns and interpretive and cultural climates. While they taint the cento through association with the misinterpretation of scripture, and while Jerome is un- comfortable with the Christianizing of Virgil’s poetry and of Virgil himself, their critiques, filtered through a Christian lens, do not function as general literary criticism and should not be taken as authoritative denunciations of the form’s

  

  poetic and aesthetic traits. In the prefatory epistle attached to his Cento Nuptialis, meanwhile, Ausonius disparages cento composition as part of his strategy of modest self-presentation, and so for rhetorical ends. (More on Au- sonius’s stance in chapters 1 and 5.) Like the comments of Tertullian and Jerome, Ausonius’s are not definitive statements on the lack of merit of the

   cento per se.

  In the modern age, several scholars have also been appalled by the cento and, pursuing slash-and-burn literary criticism, have sharply condemned the

  

   The majority of these negative reviews can be attributed to a classicizing prejudice that considers High Literature and the Great Author sacrosanct and

  

  scorns odd and secondary works that encroach on those monument Such reactions are a reminder that appropriative works of all kinds are prone to elicit aesthetic disapproval and even moral outrage from some quarters. Though none to my knowledge does so explicitly, perhaps in their minds the disapproving critics also conflate centos and plagiarism, or view cento composition as a type of theft. That would be a mistake, since the kind of open, reconstitutive ap-

   propriation that occurs in the centos is far from plagiarism’s furta.

  In this study, I wish to provide a counterweight to the often harsh responses to the cento, responses that are inadequate in their proprietary and closed vision of texts (and not unimportantly, canonical texts), if sometimes entertaining in their Housmanian vitriol. The reflexive condemnation of the patchwork texts for being curiosities rather than high literary art, and still worse, for turning high literary art into a curiosity, misses the point of the works. Centonists themselves would no doubt agree that their works are strange and parasitic, and that the texts fail to measure up to the aesthetic standards of great literature. Indeed, by their very nature the centos are and do very different things from what con- ventional high poetry is and does. Critics should bear this in mind and approach the works on their own terms. I fully recognize that, even when this injunction is followed, the patchwork technique and texts will not be to everyone’s tastes. Yet this book aims to demonstrate that the twelve mythological and secular centos can provide audiences with one of the more intricate and exciting reading

  

experiences of any poetry in antiquity.

  Once the cento form had been imported from the Greeks, it became part of a

  INTRODUCTION

  xviii

  

  material that could be reworked to yield fresh texts. Most of the pursuits through which certain members of Virgil’s ancient audience at certain points recast his poetry and made it anew have parallels in the ways Greek audiences treated Homer, and indeed result from the application of the formula ‘‘As Homer, so Virgil.’’ My area of focus, however, is strictly the Roman context and how the writing of mythological and secular centos relates to practices that arose around Virgil. In this arena, we find a wide range of works showing that Virgil’s poetry was not only canonical and monumental but also a rich source for derivative or secondary composition.

  Conventional imitation offers one example of how ancient authors recast Vir-

  

  gil. Yet there were also practices involving a more direct and insistent reworking of Virgilian material. The schools were an important setting for these pursuits. Virgil’s poetry, and especially the Aeneid, held a central position in the schools of grammar and an important one in the schools of rhetoric from the time Caecilius Epirota made him a school text in or around 26 BC through late antiquity wherever

  

  traditional secular education survived. One of the things that students at both levels were sometimes called on to do was to rewrite passages of his poetry.

  Ethopoeiae, or exercises in which students composed a speech for a literary or

  

  mythological characte serve as one example of how Virgilian poetry lay open to young authorial hands. A notable reference to an impersonation of a Virgilian character comes from Augustine. The Church Father relates that as a student in a school of grammar, he wrote a prose passage in which the Juno of Aeneid 1 expresses her anger at being unable to keep the Trojans from reaching Italy. For this exercise Augustine received a prize, the recollection of which brought him no satisfaction later in life (Conf. 1.17). Another Virgilian ethopoeia comes from En- nodius (473/4–521), who taught rhetoric before becoming bishop of Rome ca. 513. Ennodius’s life as a teacher is reflected in his collected Dictiones, among which are pieces that served as Ennodius’s models of school exercises. One of the Dictiones is a work that modern editors have entitled Verba Didonis Cum Abeuntem Videret Aeneam. This piece, which demonstrates that Virgil has a place in the rhetorical schools, takes A. 4.365 (nec tibi diva parens generis) as its starting point and recasts Dido’s speech that follows (A. 4.365–387; Dict. 28 [CSEL 6, 505–506]).

  Still more evidence for school exercises that take their cue from Virgil ap-

  

  pears in Servius. In his note ad Aen. 10.18, Servius mentions that Titianus and Calvus devised themata, which would appear to mean situations derived from specific passages in Virgil’s poetry, that students might utilize ad dicendi

  

  usum. In the same entry, Servius mentions controversiae written in conjunc- tion with A. 10.18–95. Later in his commentary, Servius links Virgil further to the schools of rhetoric by calling attention to one qui in Vergilium scripsit

  

  declamationes (ad A. 10.53 Presumably, these various exercises appeared in prose, the usual medium for such material.

  It may be that students were also educated in verse composition, despite Quintilian’s assertion that poetry should be only a respite from study (car-

   INTRODUCTION

  xix occurred in the grammatical schools, it may have involved recasting Virgil’s poetry, given his importance in the curriculum. Whether this also could have happened in the Latin rhetorical schools is a bit more questionable. While verse

  

  exercises arose in the rhetorical schools of Egypt, the Western curriculum

  

  focused more on the practice of declamation. Even so, it is possible that students at that upper level also composed Virgilian ethopoeiae and paraphrases

   in verse, or even hexameter declamations derived from the Aeneid.

  Examples of poems deriving from Virgilian school exercises appear in the codex Salmasianus, a manuscript dating anywhere from the seventh to the early

  

  ninth century. The Salmasianus preserves a collection of poems put together in

  

   Africa circa 534, whose compiler is unknown. This collection, which forms

  

  an important part of the Anthologia Latina, includes many of the mythological and secular centos. The first of the Virgilian poems with links to school exercises is the Locus Vergilianus (AL 214 SB) written by the late fifth- to early sixth- century poet Coronatus, who may have been identical to the author, called

   Coronatus scholasticus, of a grammatical treatise on final syllables. (Scholas-

  ticus could mean that Coronatus was a grammarian or that he simply was

  

  learned.) Whether or not Coronatus scholasticus was our Coronatus, the author of the Locus, being able to write a poem on a Virgilian theme, was in all likeli- hood a highly educated adult (for there is no reason to think that the Locus is the work of Coronatus as a schoolboy). The title of the Locus as given in the Sal- masianus derives from A. 3.315, where Aeneas encounters Andromache and asks what she has suffered since the fall of Troy. Yet it seems that whoever gave the poem its title was in error, since Coronatus’s work appears to derive from the

  

  section in Aeneid 5 where the Trojan women have set fire to Aeneas’s fleet. In this reading, the term Locus Vergilianus denotes simply a passage with a Virgilian pedigree; but the work is in fact a versified ethopoeia presenting Aeneas’s emo- tional reaction to the arson. The other two Virgilian pieces in the Salmasianus are the anonymous Themata Vergiliana (AL 237, 249 SB), which recast

  A. 12.653–658 and 4.385–387 respectively. As themata, the poems would seem to be versified versions of the exercise that Servius mentions ad Aen. 10.18. While we cannot know if the anonymous authors were students or adults, it is more plausible that they, like Coronatus, were adults writing poems stemming from pursuits they had known in the schools.

  Another group of second-degree Virgilian texts consists of several hexameter summaries of his poetry, and mainly the Aeneid. The author of one set (AL 1 SB), which is preserved in the late antique codex Romanus (R, Vergilianus Vaticanus Lat. 3867), assumes the identity of Ovid in a preface to ten-line summaries of each book of the Aeneid. The figure of Ovid also looms behind the synopsis whose author greatly increases the degree of difficulty of his under- taking by describing the content of all twelve books of the Aeneid in six lines (AL 672a R). This time, it is a manuscript that attributes the summaries to

43 Ovid; the anonymous author himself offers no ‘‘first-person’’ preface and no

  INTRODUCTION

  xx Other examples of bravura compression are two anonymous works, one that summarizes the entire Virgilian corpus in eleven lines (AL 717R) and the other in seventeen lines (AL 720a R). The dates of AL 672a 717, and 720a R are uncertain; but it is quite possible that they belong to late antiquity. In a less virtuoso performance, an anonymous author writes four-line argumenta that Shackleton Bailey presents alongside accounts (also tetrastich) of the Eclogues

   and Georgics (AL 2 and 2a SB).

  Still another set of argumenta appears under the name of Sulpicius Car- thaginiensis, who produces six-line summaries of the Aeneid (AL 653 R). This figure is probably not the same Sulpicius who composed an epigram cited in

  VSD 38 on how Varius and Tucca thwarted Virgil’s dying wish and preserved

  

  the Aeneid from immolation. Of that poem, the epitomizer offers a feeble

  

  imitation in a preface to his summaries, perhaps in order to try to pass himself off as the Sulpicius Carthaginiensis of Virgil’s biography. These two groups of text probably date again to late antiquity. Finally, twelve five-line summaries of each book of the Aeneid survive from the so-called Twelve Wise Men (AL 591– 602 R); but it has been convincingly argued that the group is actually Lac-

  

  tantius, writing under twelve assumed names. One of the Twelve Wise Men, ‘‘Basilius,’’ also writes a twelve-line synopsis of the entire Aeneid, with each line

   devoted to a book of the epic (AL 634 R).

  The hexameter argumenta in all likelihood derive from the schools of grammar, where teachers probably gave students verbal summaries of sections and books of the Aeneid before embarking on deeper analyses of grammar and

  

  content. Summaries in written form are also quite feasible; these would have been in prose, though the possibility that grammarians sometimes composed them in verse cannot be ruled out. It may also be the case that students would have been called on to recite spontaneously synopses of passages or books of the Aeneid, as well as to write them, and then in prose, and just maybe in verse.

  The authors of the hexameter argumenta were probably adults who had been formally educated in the schools; some may have also been grammatici. Should Lactantius lie behind the Twelve Wise Men, moreover, one of the summarizers would have been a teacher of rhetoric, assuming Lactantius wrote under the guise of that coterie while a teacher and before his conversion to Christianity ca. 303. These figures may have considered the Virgilian summaries they en- countered in the schools to be the pursuits upon which they were elaborating as they developed various approaches to versifying synopses of Virgil’s epic, as well as occasionally of his other works. Such poetic efforts have the markings of pastimes undertaken during the authors’ otium and as light entertainment, rather than of pieces intended for practical use in the schools.

  The mythological and secular Virgilian centonists almost certainly received a

  

  traditional education in the schools of grammar and rhetoric, where they would have been relentlessly exposed to Virgil. This would have enabled them to acquire the sort of familiarity with Virgilian poetry necessary to pursue cento

  INTRODUCTION

  xxi was a child-centonist. In addition, some of the centonists besides Ausonius, the professor of Bordeaux, may have been teachers, and so may have constantly

   brushed up their Virgil in their professional lives.

  Links to the schools may also explain why the centonists were acculturated to recasting Virgil. Like the authors of Virgilian scholastic poetry, the patchwork poets would have learned in the school setting that they could do things with

   Virgil’s poetry, which stood as a body of material open to recasting. Having

  come to understand in the schools that there was no barrier between them- selves and Virgil’s poetry, the centonists may have viewed patchwork compo- sition, being an act of secondary authorship, as an extension of the principle

   that they had encountered in the curriculum.

  Of course, cento composition is a very different pursuit from creating Virgilian school texts and from writing versified Virgilian ethopoeiae, themata, and sum- maries. In fact, the processes of recasting Virgil in the mythological and secular centos have more in common with another method of rewriting his poetry in antiquity. This practice stems from Virgil’s vast popularity in the West, a si- tuation that owed much, but not everything, to his place in the scholastic curriculum. Virgil’s verses were something of a lingua franca in Roman society, though of course individuals had varying levels of command of that poetic language. One of the results of the renown of Virgil’s poetry was the direct quotation of that material in a wide array of settings. This could involve using Virgil’s verses proverbially, as a sort of footnote supporting a particular state- ment or argument (and the belief that Virgil was a master in every branch of

  

  learning contributed to this phenomenon), or citing it as material to be re-

  

  futed. More relevant to the cento is the practice of quoting Virgil’s verba only to transform his content or res by adapting his tags to fit new situations and

  

  subjects. While such activity was not exclusive to Virgil, audiences trans- formed his verses in this manner most frequently of all poetry in the Latin tradition. (Greek authors, especially Homer, were also reused in this way by Latin writers.) The productive quotation of Virgil could have comic ends, with his language applied to low material, and so deflated humorously, or could occur in serious contexts.

  Directly quoting Virgil’s lines and adapting their meaning in new contexts oc- curs in graffiti, and in the process shows that people of all stripes knew some

57 Virgil. Citing a line from the Eclogues, Georgics, or Aeneid also happened in

  everyday conversations, though records of such ephemeral quotations naturally appear in written sources. The literary evidence, which consists of prose works containing the transformed line or lines of Virgilian hexameter, also demonstrates that writers themselves often quoted and adapted the content of Virgilian lines in their texts.

  Seneca the Elder gives early examples of citations of Virgil that alter his content. In Suas. 4.5, Seneca reports that Arellius Fuscus chastised a pupil for

  INTRODUCTION

  xxii a declamation about Alexander the Great when he could have cited more aptly A. 2.553, capulo tenus abdidit ensem, for ornamental purposes. In the same Suasoria (4.4), Seneca shows that Fuscus himself quoted A. 4.379–380, applying Dido’s sarcastic (and, as it turns out, wrong) assessment of the gods’ interest in Aeneas’s affairs in a speech refuting claims that the gods care about childbirth (Suas. 4.4). Seneca adds that Fuscus quoted the line summis cla-

   moribus, to very boisterous approval.

  Petronius provides further glimpses into the practice of transforming Virgi-

  

  lian verses. In the Cena Trimalchionis, Petronius has Trimalchio quote A. 2.44, sic notus Ulixes? to refer to his own heroic gourmandizing (Sat. 39). Later, when describing the lady of Ephesus, Petronius has her nurse, playing the role of Anna, quote A. 4.34 and 4.38 (Sat. 111, 112). Here parody of Aeneid 4 specifically is a goal, with the story of Dido recalled but comically adapted and lowered in the account of the bereaved lady of Ephesus who, despite her sorrow, succumbs to the advances of another man.

  Much of the rest of the non-Christian literary evidence for the transforma- tive quotation of Virgil—and the examples I give are meant to be representative, not exhaustive—is connected to emperors. (Far from a sign that the practice was largely an imperial phenomenon, the cluster of material simply shows that a good amount of the extant Latin prose literature after Virgil was concerned with imperial politics and those in power.) Seneca the Younger provides an example of how one could change Virgil for comic purposes with his biting statement that Livius Geminius will claim to have seen Claudius walking non passibus aequis—a phrase taken from A. 2.724, describing Ascanius, and applied to the lame em- peror (Apocol. 1.1). Later in the work, Seneca has Mercury cite G. 4.90, dede neci, melior vacua sine regnet in aula, in reference to Claudius (Apocol. 3.2).

  Suetonius notes other instances of such citations of Virgil by or in relation to the emperors. Upon encountering men in dark cloaks rather than traditional Roman dress at a contio, Augustus cries: Romanos, rerum dominos gentemque togatam (A. 1.282) (Suet. Div. Aug. 40). In doing so, Augustus gives the Vir- gilian line not only a different referent but also a sardonic tone, since he disapproves of the men’s clothing and is compelling them to remember and adopt the traditional Roman ways of dressing. A freedman of Nero, meanwhile, reuses the Virgilian usque adeone mori miserum est? (A. 12.646) when he sees the emperor trying to flee from the perils that surround him (see Suet. Ner. 47). The freedman, emboldened by what he rightly sees as Nero’s imminent demise, delivers the line in disgust, and he wishes to draw a contrast between the emperor’s cowardice and the behavior of Turnus, exhorted to battle by Juturna disguised as the charioteer Metiscus.

  Virgilian lines continued to be quoted and adapted in connection with later emperors. So Quintilian, in the slavering mode of panegyric, ends his praise of the poetic achievements of Domitian by citing E. 8.13, inter victrices hederam tibi serpere laurus (Inst. Orat. 10.1.91–92). A later example appears when the INTRODUCTION

  xxiii at the poor progress of the siege of Hatra in 199 by quoting A. 11.371 (scilicet ut Turno contingat regia coniunx). The point is that Severus’s soldiers, like Turnus’s in the Aeneid, are suffering in a war waged for no real reason. The emperor seems not to have appreciated the clever way that this criticism was

   offered, as he had Crispus killed.

  Further evidence for such alterations of Virgil appears in the Historia Au- gusta. While the historical accuracy of this material may be questioned, it at least shows that the author of the Historia Augusta, or the sources that he may be following, is familiar with the act of modifying Virgilian lines. Thus Hadrian is reported to have quoted A. 6.869–872, which refer to Marcellus, and to have applied the lines to his presumptive heir Verus (see HA Ael. Spart., Ael. 4.1-

  

  3). Another example appears in conjunction with Diocletian, who is said to have cited Aeneae magni dextra cadis (A. 10.830) at an assembly when he killed Aper, himself the assassin of the emperor Numerian. Vopiscus, the nominal author of the entry in the Historia Augusta in which the anecdote appears, is surprised that a soldier should have such command of Virgil, but adds that many are accustomed to quoting passages from comedians and other poets (HA Flav. Vop., Num. 13.3–5). Vopiscus’s wonder seems misplaced, since Virgil

   could have been known in army barracks as well as in imperial palaces.

  Transforming the meaning of quoted Virgilian material also occurred outside of imperial contexts and continued well into late antiquity, as is clear from the epistles of the fifth-century bishop, man of letters, and court figure Sidonius Apollinaris. Writing to the otherwise unknown Turnus in Ep. 4.24.1, Sidonius cites a line in the Aeneid containing a reference to Virgil’s own Turnus (A. 9.6–7). Immediately before doing so, Sidonius says explicitly that he is adapting Virgilian material appropriate to his addressee’s situation: bene nomini, bene negotio tuo congruit Mantuani illud: ‘‘Turne, optime optanti divum promittere nemo / auderet, volvenda dies en attulit ultro.’’ In Ep. 5.17.7, moreover, Sidonius describes to Eriphius a game of ball in which an enthusiastic Philomathius participated by citing A. 5.499: hic vir inlustris Philomathius, ut est illud Mantuani poetae, ‘‘ausus et ipse manu iuvenum temptare laborem’’ sphaeristarum se turmalibus constanter im- miscuit. At still another point in his collection of epistles, Sidonius alters the referent of a quoted line from the Eclogues, as he opens a letter to Constantius by applying E. 8.11 to him (a te principium, tibi desinet) (Ep. 7.18.1).

  Epitaphs constitute another significant body of material in which Virgilian

  

  lines are quoted and their meanings modified. In the inscriptions, Virgilian material often appears as clausulae; yet there are also instances when whole

  

  lines of Virgil are reused. Notable in this regard is an epitaph found in B. 1786 (CIL 6.9685), from Rome and inscribed under an image of a butcher’s wife selling a goose, which goes so far as to reproduce three entire lines of Virgil (A. 1.607–609): dum montibus umbrae/lustrabunt, [c]onvexa polus dum sidera

   pascet/ semper honos nomenq. tuum laudesque manebunt.

  Cento composition is closely linked to the semantic modification of quoted

  

  INTRODUCTION

  xxiv together to create new, coherent narratives—a more difficult enterprise, to be sure. Literary and epigraphical examples appear as steps along the way from citing and adapting isolated Virgilian lines to writing full-fledged centos. In those examples, we find what might be called inchoate centos, or very short passages made up of Virgil’s verses. A comic manifestation of this practice, and one that provides the earliest evidence for any type of Virgilian cento, appears in Petronius (Sat. 132.11). There Encolpius addresses his unresponsive mentula through Virgilian lines strung together to create a brief cento: illa solo fixos oculos aversa tenebat nec magis incepto vultum sermone movetur (A. 6.469–470) quam lentae salices (E. 5.16) lassove papavera collo. (A. 9.436)

  A very different example appears in Capitolinus’s account in the Historia Au- gusta of Macrinus. According to Capitolinus, Macrinus, a praetorian prefect who assassinated Caracalla and became emperor, had bloodthirsty ways that included reviving the punishment inflicted by Mezentius of tying a living person to a corpse and forcing him to die a slow and smelly death (see A. 8.485–488). Capitolinus says that someone composed a salute to Diadumenus, a rival of Macrinus, by linking two lines of Virgil (but with no regard for meter): egregius forma iuvenis (A. 6.861 or 12.275, which read egregium forma iuvenem) cui

  

  pater haud Mezentius esset (A. 7.654) (HA Jul. Cap., Opil. Macr. 12.9). Finally, certain inscriptions also consist of Virgilian verse units recomposed in cento form. Examples are the epitaphs reading concordes animae (A. 6.827) quondam, cum vita maneret (A. 5.724, with slight alterations: the Aeneid reads dum vita manebat) (L. 1969, 1), and hic pietatis honos: (A. 1.253) veteris stat gratia facti

   (A. 4.539) (B. 817).

  Petronius’s obscene passage, the political slogan, and the epitaphs are less virtuoso literary performances than are the twelve longer mythological and secular centos. Even so, their authors have moved from the semantic alteration of a single Virgilian verse unit to reassembling discrete units in order to create a new nar- rative. This shows that there were instances when Virgil was recomposed in a way

  

  that mirrored in miniature the practices of the Virgilian centonists. The short patchwork texts thus stand at a conceptual and formal midpoint between the quotation of individual Virgilian verses in new narrative settings and the creation of longer literary texts completely comprised of reconnected Virgilian lines.

  The existence of inchoate patchwork texts demonstrates further that those who wrote the twelve mythological and secular Virgilian centos, while certainly producing startling works, were not totally anomalous in the Roman context. The parallels are exact, though different in scale, between the corpus of centos and the short, stitched-together pieces in Petronius, the Historia Augusta, and the epigraphical material; but the centos also link up with the act of quoting and transforming discrete Virgilian lines. Along with perhaps acquiring in the INTRODUCTION

  xxv authorship, then, the centonists adopted a method of composition with a connection to how a wide range of Virgil’s ancient audience remade units of his poetry. The available evidence does not reveal whether any of the centonists saw a link between his pursuit and the widespread adaptation of isolated Vir- gilian verses or the brief cento passages. What a broad view of Virgil’s ancient reception does show is that the patchwork authors resembled others who productively quoted Virgil, as well as those who in different ways rewrote Virgil in school exercises or scholastic poems, in considering his poetry far from inviolate and capable of being recast. For the centonists, as for various members of the Roman world engaging in various pursuits, Virgil’s poetry remained less

   the domain of an isolated artistic genius than open and reusable material.

  While the Virgilian corpus stood lofty and marmoreal, pieces taken from it, whether passages or individual lines, could, like Deucalion and Pyrrha’s lapides, acquire new formae and new life.

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